Related papers: Public speech recognition transcripts as a configu…
Virtual Personal Assistants like Siri have great potential but such developments hit the fundamental problem of how to make computational devices that understand human speech. Natural language understanding is one of the more disappointing…
Building reliable conversational AI assistants for customer-facing industries remains challenging due to noisy conversational data, fragmented knowledge, and the requirement for accurate human hand-off - particularly in domains that depend…
Human annotation of natural language facilitates standardized evaluation of natural language processing systems and supports automated feature extraction. This document consists of instructions for annotating the temporal information in…
The human language is one of the most natural interfaces for humans to interact with robots. This paper presents a robot system that retrieves everyday objects with unconstrained natural language descriptions. A core issue for the system is…
We have seen significant advancements in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the 21st century. It has enabled a new technology where we can have a human-like conversation with the machines. The most significant use of this…
Recent work in automatic recognition of conversational telephone speech (CTS) has achieved accuracy levels comparable to human transcribers, although there is some debate how to precisely quantify human performance on this task, using the…
Relying on a large corpus of natural interactions between visitors and a robot in a museum setting, we study a recurrent practice through which humans "worked" to maintain the robot as a competent participant: the description by bystanders,…
For d/Deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) people, captioning is an essential accessibility tool. Significant developments in artificial intelligence (AI) mean that Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is now a part of many popular applications.…
When encountering a robot in the wild, it is not inherently clear to human users what the robot's capabilities are. When encountering misunderstandings or problems in spoken interaction, robots often just apologize and move on, without…
Today, as seen in smart speakers, spoken dialogue technology is rapidly advancing to enable human-like interaction. However, current dialogue systems cannot pay attention not only to the content of speech, but also to the way of speaking…
Even though intelligent systems such as Siri or Google Assistant are enjoyable (and useful) dialog partners, users can only access predefined functionality. Enabling end-users to extend the functionality of intelligent systems will be the…
Facial expressions are an ideal means of communicating one's emotions or intentions to others. This overview will focus on human facial expression recognition as well as robotic facial expression generation. In the case of human facial…
As the first robotic platforms slowly approach our everyday life, we can imagine a near future where service robots will be easily accessible by non-expert users through vocal interfaces. The capability of managing natural language would…
How human-like do conversational robots need to look to enable long-term human-robot conversation? One essential aspect of long-term interaction is a human's ability to adapt to the varying degrees of a conversational partner's engagement…
The speech code is a vehicle of language: it defines a set of forms used by a community to carry information. Such a code is necessary to support the linguistic interactions that allow humans to communicate. How then may a speech code be…
Robots that interact with humans in a physical space or application need to think about the person's posture, which typically comes from visual sensors like cameras and infra-red. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms use…
Socially competent robots should be equipped with the ability to perceive the world that surrounds them and communicate about it in a human-like manner. Representative skills that exhibit such ability include generating image descriptions…
A robot needs contextual awareness, effective speech production and complementing non-verbal gestures for successful communication in society. In this paper, we present our end-to-end system that tries to enhance the effectiveness of…
Spoken language interaction is at the heart of interpersonal communication, and people flexibly adapt their speech to different individuals and environments. It is surprising that robots, and by extension other digital devices, are not…
The growing prevalence of conversational voice interfaces, powered by developments in both speech and language technologies, raises important questions about their influence on human communication. While written communication can signal…